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The Ferris Collection of Prints

The Museum’s Graphic Arts Collection, the oldest print-collecting unit in the Smithsonian, focuses on the technical and social history of printmaking to document how prints are made and used. Smithsonian art museums collect works on paper selected for aesthetic reasons, but the National Museum of American History (formerly the Museum of History and Technology) takes a broad view of visual culture.

Our prints illustrate technical developments and cultural changes. They represent all kinds of graphic works that have influenced American society. The collection has always included examples from many periods and countries, fine-art prints as well as popular and commercial graphic art, together with the plates, blocks, and tools used to produce prints. In 1996 the Museum presented an exhibition on 150 years of Smithsonian print collecting, Building a National Collection.

One of the largest print collections ever received by the Smithsonian was donated by the Ferris family between 1927 and 1932. Stephen James Ferris (1835–1915), a Philadelphia painter and etcher, collected over 2,000 European and American prints, both reproductive and original, representing old master and contemporary printmakers. The collection incorporated a variety of artistic subjects, compositions, and styles. Ferris may well have mined it for inspiration for his own work, but he was also deeply interested in art for its own sake. He and his family and friends would have simply enjoyed studying the images.

Stephen Ferris’s watercolor view Justicia, Granada shows the Alhambra’s Gate of Justice (Puerta de la Justicia) painted during the artist’s 1881 visit to Spain. In a letter to Sylvester R. Koehler, later Curator of Graphic Arts at the Smithsonian, Ferris, deeply moved by his experiences, observed: “‘See the Alhambra and die’ seems a very appropriate expression. I feel it and have more reverence for the Arabs [sic] art than any other school.”

Today the Gate of Justice is the main entrance to the Alhambra complex, which was completed by the Moors in the fourteenth century. The Spanish, who defeated the Moors in 1492, made later additions.

Stephen Ferris remarked in an 1881 letter from southern Spain, “when arrived at Gib[ralter] we [Ferris and his son Gerome] were delighted with the Tangiers market people Arab merchants. . . .” Perhaps these rapidly caught, varied individuals in ink, pencil and watercolor on this signed sheet are from the streets of Gibraltar.

Were it not identified as a brewery on Girard Avenue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the building in this unsigned 1879 watercolor and pencil study could easily be mistaken for one of Stephen Ferris’s Moorish subjects from his trip to southern Spain in 1881. There are two more watercolor studies of the brewery; see: GA*14546 and GA*14547.

While in Granada, Spain in 1881, Stephen Ferris made the watercolor and pencil drawing of the Casa de Mariano. He based his print Casa de Mariano (see GA*14404.03) on the drawing, but added details to the print like a donkey poking its head through the window and a woman spinning in the doorway of the cave.

The signed watercolor is one of three in the Ferris Collection in which Stephen Ferris depicted the brewery on Girard Avenue in Philadelphia. The similarity of the building to Moorish architecture probably appealed to the artist, who was very interested in that subject. However buildings in the pencil sketch at upper right look more like Philadelphia. See also GA*14540 and GA*14547.

The signed and dated watercolor of a Philadelphia brewery was made eight years after an earlier dated view in the Ferris Collection. No doubt Ferris was returning to a favorite subject. See GA*14546 and GA*14540.